The 2025 season of the League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK) will look very much different from the previous editions after LCK announced a major revamp to its format for the next season. Korea’s premier LoL tournament will be split into five rounds in a single LCK season, and a new cup competition has been introduced for the year 2025.
The newly introduced changes will come in next year as the LCK CUP will kick off the new season, starting from January and ending in February. The LCK CUP will have two groups, picked by the 2024 Summer finalists Gen.G and Hanwha Life Esports. Afterwards, the play-ins and playoff brackets will follow.
The eventual winner of the LCK CUP winner will secure a spot fotr March’s new global League of Legends event. Every team ranked as the number one seeds from each regional league will qualify for a tournament that will adopt a fearless draft format.
In the fearless draft format, any champion that is banned at any point in a best-of-series will not be able to play through the whole series, a pick/ban system that will be employed in the LCK CUP.
Meanwhile, the LCK regular season will start in April and it will be independent of the LCK CUP results, meaning that the results from the cup will not have any effects on its placing.
The five rounds of the LCK season will start with the first two across April and May using a single round-robin, best-of-three format, leading to a league table similar to the 2024 regular seasons.
The top six teams will reach the Mid-Season Invitational qualifiers in June while the round three to five will have the teams divided into two groups tagged Legend and Rise. The Legend group will accommodate the top five teams from rounds one and two and Rise will have the bottom five and the groups will be split for the remainder of the regular season.
The best-of-three, single round-robin will happen in each group in each round and the leading four teams from the Legend group will progress. After all rounds, the play-in brackets will follow and then followed by the playoffs. The playoffs will determine the LCK season champions.
